This morning Council member Teresa Mosqueda, who chairs the Budget Committee, announced the plan and schedule for the Council’s deliberations on a revised 2020 city budget.
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Grim news on the city budget as revenue projections fall short
This afternoon Mayor Durkan and City Budget Director Ben Noble briefed the press on the city’s new projections for how the COVID-19 shutdown is affecting city revenues. This comes on the eve of a presentation to the City Council tomorrow morning on the same information as the Council begins considering a new $500 million payroll tax. Under their most likely scenario, revenues will fall around $210 million below budget. But in a more pessimistic outcome, the shortfall could increase to almost $300 million. Let’s dive into the details.
Continue readingSpat over LEAD budget appears to be sorted out
Over the past month an ongoing disagreement over the budget for the LEAD program flared up again, as Erica Barnett has been reporting for the last several weeks, but as of late last week it seems to be getting resolved.
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Bagshaw unveils budget balancing package
This morning Budget Chair Sally Bagshaw published her initial balancing package, incorporating a portfolio of self-balancing changes to the Mayor’s proposed budget based on last week’s proposals by Council members that received consensus support. Last’s night’s election results show that Initiative 976 will likely pass; it will blow a $35 million hole in the city budget that will need to get addressed in the next three weeks, making the initial balancing package very much a work in progress. That said, anything that didn’t make it in at this point is very unlikely to find its way in later as the …
Continue reading2020 city revenues update delivers little good news
With the “Form B” budget discussions now complete, Council member Sally Bagshaw, the budget chair, is hard at work assembling her initial “balancing package” of changes to the Mayor’s proposed budget. Her job is to cram as many of the Council’s wish-list items in, to match whatever additional revenues she can scrape together. The final piece of the puzzle is an updated projection from the City Budget Office on 2019 and 2020 revenues, which was delivered at the end of the week. Usually it delivers at least a few million dollars of extra revenues to spend; this year, not so …
Continue readingThis week in Council Chambers
All budget, all the time.
Continue readingHere are the big budget issues the Council is debating
This morning the City Council hit an important milestone in its deliberations over next year’s budget: it completed discussion of all the issues that Council members and their staff had raised for discussion with the Mayor’s proposed budget. Here’s a summary of the more significant matters currently in play.
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City Council debates the future of the Navigation Team
This morning the City Council began discussing in earnest its competing ideas for changes to next year’s budget for the homelessness response, following its first conversation two weeks ago. Much of the time was taken up with one question: what to do with the Navigation Team. And it’s clear that the Council is nowhere near consensus.
Continue readingBudget issue discussion topics announced
This morning, Budget Chair Sally Bagshaw circulated a schedule of topics for the budget “issue identification” hearings schedule for this week and early next week.
Continue readingCouncil deliberates on city’s 2020 homelessness spending plan
With a plan in the works to transition to a regional authority to organize the response to the homelessness crisis, yesterday the City Council and a collection of city departments had a public discussion of the Mayor’s proposed homelessness budget for next year.
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